The robots haven’t taken over. Yet.

There have been many attempts over the years to mechanize music that is ordinarily played by humans, and the bass guitar is no exception as you’ll see in the video below.

Before showing the robot bass playing, here’s a more recent video an acoustic guitar being played using robots:

As you can see, yes you can in fact get robots to strum a stringed instrument. And the technology has come along far enough that you can even do it with systems built with plastic LEGO bricks.

Now as for the robots playing bass, there is no other way to describe the sound than “sounds like a robot or a synthesizer making the sound.”

It certainly looks cool, no question about that:

…but when you break it down to the question of “How does it sound?”, well… still a robot and not a human.

It is still going to be a while yet before robots can accurately reproduce a human playing a bass guitar. Not only in playing but also reproducing the styles. Fingerstyle, picking, slap-pop, fretless, etc. Robots still haven’t been able to quite master that stuff just yet. 🙂